"No End in Sight" is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded.

Directed by Charles Ferguson, making his feature debut, the film relies mainly on interviews with people who were either inside the Bush administration or on the ground in Iraq in those crucial early months following the fall of Baghdad. Most of those interviewed are either career diplomats or career military officers, not anti-administration types by any stretch. Some, like Richard Armitage, were in the White House inner circle. Yet they describe an administration of such colossal ineptitude and baseless arrogance as to boggle the mind.

Ferguson doesn't impose an interpretation on the material. Some will come away from the film convinced that invading Iraq was a monumental mistake, while some will think that it might have worked. Some will come away confirmed in the opinion that the United States needs to pull out as soon as possible, while others will find confirmation for the belief that leaving now would be the worst possible course.

Yet "No End in Sight" is likely to unite everyone in the common opinion that the invasion and occupation were mismanaged on an epic scale. It's not just that "mistakes were made," to use the tired passive-voice cliche of feigned contrition, but rather that

only mistakes were made. In instance after instance, the administration ignored genuine experts in favor of people with flashy, erroneous notions. They ignored the advice of people on the ground in favor of functionaries in Washington with neither military experience nor familiarity with the Islamic world.

Some of the material covered in the film is familiar. Despite the counsel of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who said that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld went in with only 160,000 troops, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the occupation would require fewer troops than that. Following the fall of Baghdad, the first sign of something amiss in the administration's planning was the large-scale looting that engulfed the country.

Diplomatic service people talk about how their efforts to restore civil administration in Iraq were compromised by the looting. There were no computers, no desks, no chairs, no telephones. Despite this, people from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance - such as Gen. Jay Garner and Col. Paul Hughes, who figure prominently here - believed they could make a go of it, until their plans were undermined with the appointment of Paul Bremer as virtual Iraq czar in May 2003. Like senior adviser for defense Walter Slocombe, who submits to an embarrassing on-camera interview, Bremer had no relevant expertise - no military experience, no familiarity with the region and no knowledge of Arabic.

"No End in Sight" argues that Iraq was lost because of two mistakes made inside the cloister of the Defense Department, against the advice of real experts. The first was the de-Baathification decision that rendered permanently unemployed every member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, which included teachers, doctors, lawyers - essentially, the entire professional class. The second was the decision to disband the Iraqi army.

An anguished Hughes talks movingly of working with senior Iraqi military officers who couldn't wait to furnish hundreds of thousands of troops to aid in securing the country. Instead, Rumsfeld and Bremer chose to make 500,000 guys with guns unemployed. Instead of fighting the insurgency, they became the insurgency.

Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, is a cagey interview, but he makes it clear that the State Department was not happy with the Defense Department's conduct of the war.

"No End in Sight" is a saga of studies ignored, facts swept under the rug and of a president who could not be persuaded to read even the summary page of a report on the insurgency. Billions of dollars disappear. Jobs are taken from Iraqi contractors, who work cheaper and faster, and given to American companies that take forever. Career diplomats have no access to power, while Bremer surrounds himself with newly minted college graduates whose only qualification is that Dad made a campaign contribution. In one instance, a new graduate is put in charge of devising the Baghdad traffic plan despite having no familiarity with traffic planning.

The piling on of facts is devastating, and it makes moments that once might have seemed amusing - such as Rumsfeld's jovial press briefings - seem downright unsettling. "Quagmire?" he smiles. "I don't do quagmires."

-- Advisory:

This film contains disturbing images of war casualties.

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